Getting Started with Arduino

Hello, my name is Danny and welcome to my “Getting Started with Arduino” tutorials. One day I decided I was going to write a book about “Getting Started with Arduino”, but like a lot of projects it didn’t go as planned, and other things came up. I decided to try and salvage some of my initial work by posting it on a website/blog, and that’s how this site was born.

This purpose of this website is share what I have learned, and be place to throw in some of my own mindless bantering (i.e. writing). I make a living writing software, and tinker with hardware in my free time. If you come across any errors or something you think I could have explained better, I’d love to hear about in the comments section. Thanks for stopping by.

You can check out the individual tutorials by following the tabs above, or clicking on the link below.

Have you ever talked with someone that is truly an expert, and when others talk about them they always talk about how smart they are, they’ll say he/she is just a genius. Have you ever talked to a true expert, and asked how did you learn about such and such? I have many times and every single time that I can remember they would refer to a project that they worked on, not a book they read. I am not saying that experts don’t read books or tinker without a specific goal in mind, they certainly do, but from this and my own experience I think we can get bogged down reading books.

Imagine a conversation where you mention that you like to tinker around with Arduinos, (assuming the person you are talking to actually knows what an Arduino is), the question they are almost guaranteed to ask is, What have you built? you could answer that you bought a kit and first made an LED blink, then made a speaker chirp, then made a servo move, then … Their response will probably be something like oh that’s cool. On the other hand if you answer the question with “the last thing I made was a small autonomous robot” you’ll get a completely different reaction, probably they will be excited and come back with tons of questions, and hopefully want to learn about Arduino themselves

Starting out with a project in mind helps keep you focused when there is a specific goal in mind, have you ever started something new only to within a short time only to get distracted leave it behind? There is also a feeling of accomplishment with building a robot, musical instrument or other completed project. I think it makes for the most fun.

It was with this in mind that these tutorials were created. It is meant to be a tutorial that is suitable for beginners that will lead to completed project ( i.e. a robot), though more experienced folks can benefit as well. The idea is that you start small, gradually build up to more complicated parts, then if you want, combine them into a final project. This tutorial does not assume that you know very much about Arduinos or programming. This tutorial does not go into a lot of depth about how to program, but programming an Arduino is easy enough that most beginners should be able to pick it up as they go along. Get Started!